I trust you a lot more than I trust Ann Landers. I was wondering if you can give me the straight dope on the following letter that recently appeared in her column.
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“Dear Ann Landers: I am a 17-year-old high school senior. I accidentally got my girlfriend pregnant. Here’s the catch: We never actually engaged in sexual intercourse. As a matter of fact, we are both virgins. Please tell your readers that any ejaculation, whether directly within or outside the female, can lead to pregnancy. Semen ejected outside of the woman’s body can drip into her body and fertilize the ovum. Although this is an uncommon occurrence, I now know from experience that it can happen. . . . Parents should remind their kids that even what may seem like harmless foreplay or “fooling around’ can lead to an unwanted pregnancy. –Buffalo, N.Y.”
Well, it’s not as though Ann Landers hasn’t been fooled before. Straight Dope correspondent Peter van der Linden claims he conned Ann with the following jewel, which ran on July 14, 1989:
“Cervical mucus changes drastically during ovulation. It becomes a much more hospitable home for sperm and facilitates the sperm’s transport into the uterus. Some women produce copious amounts of the stuff, and it runs outside the vagina. It’s entirely possible that semen hitting this stuff would swim very fast up into the cervix. However, it’s pretty unusual.” A University of Chicago infertility expert I spoke to agrees with the foregoing.
